Go Vacation Producer: I Didn't Want to Make Ridge Racer Wii

Family-oriented game would better cater to console audience.

Namco Bandai Week Exclusive: The producer of Family Ski and Go Vacation has told SPOnG that he could have easily made a Ridge Racer title for the Nintendo Wii, but decided against it.

Masaya Kobayashi, who has been involved with the Namco racing series since the PSP iteration in 2004, revealed in an exclusive interview that he chose to create the family-friendly Ski and Vacation titles for the Wii after researching the platform's target audience.

"After making three Ridge Racer titles, my team was asked to make a new title for the Wii," Kobayashi recalls. "They didn't specify to make a new IP - in fact I think the company was probably asking me to make a Ridge Racer for it! But I thought that if it was for the Wii, the target audience is obviously different so I didn't want to make a Ridge Racer for the Wii.

"Since it was the first time we made a game for the platform, we had to get some research data - when we looked into it, we realised that the target audience for the console was families. So rather than make a really hardcore game, we wanted to make a family-based game. I told the executives that if we were doing a Wii title than Family Ski would go down better. I presented my research, and the bosses trusted me to go ahead with it."

Much more to come in our exclusive interview with Kobayashi later today.